← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#818: Informatica's CMO Jim Kruger on data as the foundation for innovation
00:32:08
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand podcast. This season we're going all in on
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Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love.
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I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops.
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Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and
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leave us a rating so others can find us as well.
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And make sure you check out our
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sponsor, Tech Systems, an industry leader in
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full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in. What if the biggest barrier to your AI powered future isn't the algorithm, but the state of your data from five years ago?
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Agility requires more than just fast decision making.
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It demands a foundational trust in the data that fuels those decisions. It's about having the right information, accessible and reliable to pivot not just your campaigns, but your entire strategy. Today we're going to talk about the often overlooked foundation of marketing agility and AI, the data infrastructure itself. We're going to explore how the role of the CMO is shifting from a master of messaging to a master of data strategy and what it takes to lead a marketing organization when the quality of your data directly determines the success of your most ambitious technology investments. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Jim Kruger, CMO at Informatica. Jim, welcome to the show.
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C
Greg. Thank you. Great to be here and thanks for the invitation.
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Yeah, yeah, definitely looking forward to talking about this. Data is so important for many reasons, always was, but seems like it's more and more important as time goes on. But before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Informatica?
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Yeah, yeah. I've been CMO at Informatica for just about four years and my background is really sort of on the wireless side of things. I worked on services and devices. I spent a bunch of time in unified communications. Last eight years I've been in data protection and data management. Yeah, and Informatica is a company that provides AI powered data management to companies. And we're considered the Switzerland of data and we support a broad ecosystem of partners and we were just recently acquired by Salesforce.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, that was big, big news as well, right?
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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Well, yeah, let's. So let's dive in and you know, I want to start from the, the strategic view here and just, you know, as I briefly mentioned the intro, just that just how important data is to modern marketing, really forming the foundation of so much. And Informatica is often described as providing the data infrastructure for that next wave of AI. From your strategic purview as cmo, how do you see this relationship between a clean governed data strategy and a brand's ability to successfully deploy and scale all of that AI driven customer experience stuff that people have been talking about for, you know, at least the last couple years?
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Yeah, yeah. So I feel very fortunate and lucky to be part of a company that, that really focuses in this area. You know, my past four years have just been pretty incredible in terms of the amount of data and information that I have access to. And the quality of the data has just been off the charts. Good. Which makes a huge difference in your marketing. So of course data is super foundational to successful AI deployments. And we have a saying at Informatica that everybody's ready for AI except for your data. And the volume of data of course is just not slowing down. It's overwhelming. It continues to grow. It's more complex coming from thousands of different sources from on prem to the cloud, structured and unstructured data. And what Informatica really does is it turns all of that chaos into business value and helps an organization build a foundational trust of data. Now is, you know, and Informatica, I think back in 2018, started working on AI components and automation within its platform. It's called the Intelligent Data Management Cloud. And, and that's made just a huge difference in terms of again our performance and our customers performance relative to having that trusted data foundation. One source of truth. You don't have different functions showing up at meetings with different sets of data because there is one source. And it's the old adage, garbage in, garbage out. And if you're trying to deploy AI solutions or agents without having that data foundation, you're likely not, not going to be successful.
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Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. And that, the garbage in, garbage out phrase, it seems like it's been around for, for probably decades at this point, but it feels like marketers and, and others who may not have traditionally even thought of, of those, those types of things have been now it's, it's a real, it's a real problem and it's a real challenge to overcome. And I would imagine, you know, with your experience in the, in the industry, you've been following this shift as well. You know, from, from your standpoint, you know, how is the strategic imperative and view of the CMO changed from, you know, that brand is still important and all of those things still important, but also this data and this technology component, you know what, how have you seen that over the years?
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Yeah, well, the role has definitely changed. I've been a CMO for almost 10 years and when I look back at the early days of when I first sort of jumped into the role to where we are today, exponentially different, for sure. However, I think there's some foundational elements that have continued to evolve and I think first and foremost a CMO must have strong business acumen and I would say these days be much more analytical and technical. But there's also, I think you can over rotate on that. So I think there's also the really important balance of being creative and being able to drive creativity within your team with the agencies that you might use. And I think that the other foundational piece is just knowing your customers at a super deep level. I think the CMO and the marketing team, in order to be strategic, they need to know customers, who the buyer is, buying committee, the practitioner, and know that Persona deeper than anybody in the company. And then also, yeah, I think a CMO needs to be what I call a dot connector. So, you know, there's, there's multiple functions within marketing and if you don't connect all of those dots, if you're not building off of each other, if you're not going to market with a holistic, what I call, system, then I think your success is going to be going to be limited. And that, that includes pulling in functions like, you know, product teams, sales teams, partner teams, customer success. And I do think that a really important part of a CMOS remit is to be the glue that holds all of that together.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well, and by that token, it's not that things have been removed from the responsibilities or the purview of the cmo, it's more that, I mean, would you say things have been added for better or worse or how do you see that?
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Yeah, yeah. I think again, of course, on the technology side, things are changing on a daily basis, no question about it. And I think, I think part of the biggest challenge that I have, and I know in talking to some of my peers, CMOs, that what choices do you make relative to technology? Because there are so many different things out there that you can do. And so it's really important to, I think, be methodical, to, you know, get in this mode. I think one of the other things that's really changed is you have to you have to test and pilot constantly. That, that's, that's super important. If you're not doing that, then again, I just don't think you're going to be very successful. So you have to be methodical. You have to really focus on, you know, the, the expense side of, of some of the technology and what does the ROI look like? Because you can chase a bunch of things, but if they aren't integrated into your tech stack, if they're not integrated into your workflow, then you know you're going to have a bunch of tactical technology that probably is going to fall flat on his face.
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Yeah, yeah, well, and, and, and to go to the, the tactical components of this. So I think you have a unique perspective on this. Of you are a cmo, but you're also CMO at a data ecosystem company. So you know, for our conversation about the, the importance of data probably probably gives you a unique vantage point there, which with so much focus on whether it's data driven decision making, this data first marketing practice, what do you see there as far as what do marketers, CMOs, marketing teams need to do tactically to get to a more data first approach?
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Yeah, well, again, I think that tech stack is really, really important in terms of what are the key components that you choose. And there's, there's certainly some things that have been in place for many, many years that are continuing to evolve, so making sure that you're taking advantage of some of those capabilities. But I do think a lot of companies are chasing AI and trying to implement things without that data foundation. So I would say that that's one of the most important things because I think the true value of AI and agents and so forth really come from sitting on top of your own data and giving you the capability to make decisions based on your own data versus the broader perspective of AI, so to speak. So I think the first thing relative to framework, and I think it's different for every company, it depends on who you're targeting.
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Right.
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And your playbook is going to be changed up, no doubt about it. But I think the most important thing is to have that Uber goal that your marketing organization is going for. And so our Uber goal at Informatica is, and this is somewhat unique again, when I talk to my peers that we own pipeline for the entire company and, and so it cuts across sales and so forth. So I report out on pipeline to our executive team every, every week in conjunction with our CRO, who's reporting out on bookings and how we're doing. And so, you know, the CEO anointed me as the single, you know, point of contact and single person responsible for pipeline. And so I make that clear to my team on a consistent basis. And so we've kind of revolved everything around that in terms of how, how does every individual's role roll up to helping to drive pipeline. And of course building our brand along the way is a key part of that, but the board and our executive committee are really looking to me to help to drive that pipeline and set sales up for success. So I think that's really important. We specced out all of our standard reporting to give us insights into all the way down to the individual rep in terms of how they're driving pipeline to the region, sub region, product level. We slice and dice it in many, many different ways and look at that on a daily basis in terms of how things are going. And while we stick to our strategy and don't zigzag from that perspective, but we do make adjustments on a constant basis if we see that an area is struggling or things of that sort. So the data really helps us to drive the outcome and helps us to make decisions on where do we put our investments and so forth. And, and we, we do deep dives, you know, across each of the functions within marketing in terms of how our campaigns are doing, what does the ROI look like, lead quality, you know, all of those things, deal size, deal cycle, and factor all of that into helping us to make the right decisions.
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Yeah, well, and there's that, let's just say classic stereotypical kind of friction between sales and marketing in some organizations, I could say many organizations maybe. But it sounds like part of the solution to that is, I mean, one is just really trying to understand what the sales teams need, which it sounds like you're getting that through data. It sounds like data is helping to solve some of, for some of those, again, traditional friction points. Is that true?
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think many marketing teams are focused on marketing sourced like what, what did our marketing team do? And, and many boards and, and CEOs are in that same boat. And, and, and that makes it difficult because a lot of times you see the marketing team high fiving at the end of the quarter. Oh, we, we met our number yet the, you know, the company missed its plan and stocks going down and it's just not, just not right. So I really like the way that our CEO has set things up and really anointed me as the leader of that and that has really helped us to drive a really strong relationship and we have a, when we look at how we develop pipeline, one of the key areas is co create and that's the area that we, that has really exploded in terms of marketing and sales working together. And that's helped us to, you know, exceed our plans and to really, you know, drive the right pipeline, more high quality pipeline. And you know, the, the team has just gotten better and better at that. And, and we constantly interact and, and plan and build strategies in conjunction with, with our sales teams. And I think it's really important for marketing to be ahead of sales. So we're typically looking out six months ahead. We're looking at the rolling four quarters of pipeline so that we get visibility into what's coming up. And one great example of how data helped us to make a go to market change was in our industry area. It's our largest segments in the US and we had industry campaigns that were running but they, the ROI in them was just not very good. So we went to the head of sales, if you can imagine, you know, we were proposing to basically kill all of those campaigns because we were driving better ROI through our horizontal use cases. And the sales leader, based on data that we presented to them basically agreed to kill all of the industry campaigns and bring the industry opportunities in through horizontal use cases. And they have accelerated. We improved their pipeline by literally 30% by doing that. And so that's just a great example of where we brought data to the table. We convinced a sales leader who was leading that area to kill those campaigns. And when we look back it was like, wow, that was a great decision.
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In addition to your role as cmo, you also co founded CMO Forward, a peer focused initiative. Can you talk a little bit about that and just in addition to what you experience on a day to day at Informatica, what are you hearing from fellow CMOs as far as you know some of these challenges with tech adoption, AI use cases, etc.
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Yeah, yeah. So CMO Forward is a concept that I came up with. I go to a lot of different CMO roundtables and things of that sort and typically do readouts to my team, but it's just not the same as sitting in the room. So I reached out to some of my colleagues that I worked with previously who are CMOs and we formed this small group and met on a quarterly basis and we came up with specific Topics that we all thought the teams would like to hear. So we invited our entire teams for the conversation and came up with specific topics around AI use cases approach, different vendors and technology and some of the results that we're seeing. And, you know, we focused on career development, things of that sort that we knew the team would be super interested in. So, so it proved out to be a really, really good concept that the entire team could participate in. And I think there was a lot of learning around in the early days again of AI use cases. And we're, you know, many CMOs are, we're all in the same boat. We're trying to figure out what, what is the biggest impact, things that we can do because again, we get hit by, you know, probably two to three vendors on a daily basis. There's new companies, you know, starting up on a daily basis. So having that, you know, that that group to bounce ideas off of has, has helped tremendously. And I think the team has heard it firsthand in those discussions and taken away some key nuggets to really help to focus on, you know, what's most important and what's the big, where are we going to get the biggest bang for the buck? Yeah.
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Yeah, love it. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I can definitely attest to the value of learning from conversations. So I feel very lucky to, to be able to have conversations like this, you know, a few, few times a week. So, you know, as, as much as you can read and, and do, you know, do other types of things, it's, you know, sometimes there's just that, that interaction, you, you get some nuance that you just don't get from, you know, even the best written article or things like that. So, yeah, so let's talk a little bit about measurement. And you know, this is one of those things where I feel like there's certainly, there's, even at the board level, there's a lot of pressure to adopt AI. And whether there's probably varying understandings of what exactly that means, that depending on the board and the C Suite and everything like that, but there's still a lot of pressure to do that. So making the case for AI adoption or, you know, big, big investments in data, it sounds like, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but like, it sounds like it's not as hard to make the case, but making the right case for the right technology and the right approach is still, you know, still requires being able to measure ROI and communicate that. How do you recommend that CMOS measure and communicate some of this Foundational data management that really needs to be done, you know, to what you're saying earlier. The garbage in, garbage out, you know, we've got to get the data right to do everything else that needs to get done. Are marketers still struggling to communicate that or is it, you know, what's going on there? That's, that's still kind of a disconnect.
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Yeah, yeah, I think there's, there's definitely data that you can bring to the table. In fact, we're just. Next week we're going to be releasing our CDO survey where we surveyed 600 global data leaders across the US, UK, Europe and APJ. And it's clear that everybody is moving forward with deploying AI. In fact, our study showed that this year it moved from 48% of the companies that were deploying generative AI to 69% of the companies this year in terms of deployment. But the poor data quality continues to hamper and be a primary obstacle to success in those deployments. So 57% of the leaders view data reliability as a key barrier. And so if you don't have clean data and start with that foundational piece, your AI deployments are just not going to be successful. So I think bringing some data to the table around what that looks like and what you're proposing as sort of the foundational piece is critically important. And then just doing some level of prediction in terms of what type of productivity increases you're going to see and how it's going to impact the business. Because at the end of the day, that's the most important thing. And boards and executive teams, you know, my board doesn't really, really care so much about, you know, the details of how we're going to get there. They really want to know, like, how is this going to improve your output relative to pipeline and our output relative to net new business, how are we going to drive better conversion rates and so forth. So you got to make sure that you're linking all of your investments and ideas and projects to how you're going to drive those Uber goals. And I think you'll get better buy in by the board by doing that. And so we've, we've reported out, I report out to the board on, you know, again, our productivity increases. Some of that is, is, yes, it's manual reporting things of that sort. There's certainly some estimates and things of that sort, but we know that, that we're seeing some, some really significant increases in productivity increases in Pipeline, for example, with our conversational AI bots. We've generated over 10 million in revenue for leads that we wouldn't have worked otherwise. And so that's a fresh incremental $10 million of pipeline and the cost for us for a year was $60,000. So those types of things and, and I think just getting the board's buy in to do testing and pilots and then coming back with the results of those and then again saying I want to scale this because this is working extremely well. Here are their results. So those are just some of the tips I would give. Yeah, yeah.
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And so looking forward and certainly, you know, we're at the beginning of the year here, so always one of those, let's try to look out a little bit at least. You know, what do you see as the, the skills or competencies that marketing leaders need to develop to, you know, as we were saying earlier, things aren't getting taken away from the role of a CMO or a marketing leader. They tend to get added to or, you know, connecting the dots and all those things that you referred to, what's the, you know, what do you think is the most important skill that a marketing leader should be developing now?
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Yeah, there's. Picking one is just too hard. Of course there's, you know, there's multiple pieces of, you know, being customer first, being able to tell stories, but again the whole AI components and technology components and being able to leverage AI in your organization and create an environment within your organization is really important because it's, at the end of the day, it's all about people. And do our people, do they feel free to experiment, do they feel free to fail? And so as a cmo, I think you need that skill to set that tone within your organization for people to try different things. And I think you as a CMO have to set the tone in terms of using AI as well and being a practitioner and being able to show the team that you're using it as well and set the example. So I think that the convergence of AI and data are really the important skill. And again, being business wise in terms of which things you choose to do because again, there's a lot of different things that you're going to be proposed and you have to have that business sense of where you're going to get the best roi.
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Yeah, yeah, well, and I also love that you acknowledge that, you know, if you do experiments, 100 of those experiments are not going to be successful. Right. So like that, that acknowledgement that, you know, it's, I mean you can say failure, but it's it, if you're learning, you know, it's, it's not really failure. Right. So, you know, I think that, that acknowledgment from a leader and just that safe environment to, you know, sure, we want to be smart about resources and time and everything like that. But yeah, I think just leaders that enable their teams to just do experiments regardless of the outcomes. I mean, I think it's just, it's critical, right?
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Yeah, absolutely. It's, Couldn't agree more. Yeah.
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Well, Jim, thanks so much for joining today. I've got two last questions for you as we wrap up here. First, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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About? Yeah, I, I, I think it's really the convergence of, of data and AI and you know, it's just going to get better and better faster and faster. Automation is going to be, you know, a key part of automating. Certain tasks are going to be a key part of how marketing teams operate. So, you know, I think it's, it, it's going to continue to advance. And I think the, the other key thing we'll be talking about is, is how does marketing continue to be more the predictor of how the business is, is performing and looking out, you know, over the, over the next year and leveraging AI and data to, to help to manage the business and be more predictable.
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Yeah, yeah, love it.
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Well, last question for you here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Yeah, it's, it's tough because there's, there's so much, so much happening, so much information. But I'm constantly reading, learning from others. I interact with customers quite a bit to understand their challenges, test messaging, where do they go for information, things of that sort. And then one of the things that I do, which I know my team really gets a lot out of, is every quarter I do a sales roundtable and I get our account executives or business development reps, our inside sales on a call without their managers and we ask them a series of questions of what's happening in the market, what's working, what's not working, what content are they using. And we usually get some really good information from our sales team from that perspective. And then I typically, you know, I love to be externally facing. So I'm doing probably three to four, you know, CMO events and roundtables a quarter, talking to my peers constantly. So sort of all of those things together I think give me some sense of kind of what, what's happening, but it definitely can be overwhelming and, and it's just a lot to, to take in for sure. So you have to, you have to be a sponge and you have to be a learner for sure.
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Yeah, I love it.
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Well, again, I'd like to thank Jim Krueger, CMO at Informatica, for joining the show. You can learn more about Jim and Informatica by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services,
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talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again
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